Yeah, the quality of the digital files makes a huge difference. When I make mixes now, I tend to rip all of the tracks to Apple Lossless files (a format I don't like, but it's the only lossless format Serato supports other than WAV, which doesn't support tags) just cos to me it sounds exactly the same and it means I'm wearing out cheapo Serato vinyl instead of the actual records. It also means I can just have 1 record on my turntable all the time, which sounds kinda lazy - and is - but when I'm multitracking I'll often swap back and forth between tracks to add/change bits, so that's quite handy. Serato definitely isn't 1:1 for scratching, but for all mixing and most scratching I would say that it's just as good. If I was just cutting, then I would rather use a regular record though for sure. In terms of ownership of music, MP3 is worthless to me. I'd rather have vinyl any day. I'm sure you have plenty, but having every file as lossless/wav surely beasts memory. I'd like to have serato but I only have a 250G hardrive on my laptop I reckon if I recorded all the tracks I wanted in as a wav it would beast it!???